Poor performances on Opencart 1.4?

Hello, I'm new on Opencart, but I'm experiencing a strange problem, I've imported about 400 categories in database (I should import about 15.000,00) using the wanderful import/export utility, the operation was gone good and without errors, all OK, but when I went on the home page of the site I've noticed a very hudge increasing of CPU usage (about 98%) and a very high increasing of load time. I'm working on my local machine (Linuz, Apache, PHP). What I ask: someone has a hudge categories number in Opencart 1.4? Is normal this performance decreasing?

15.000 categories? wtf... do you have your own ebay (has 50.000 categories)? ? ?

With this huge amount of categories and products you should buy a real server rack and do not test it on your local machine.

How long from your life time you insert the products and descriptions of your products?

ehm...15.000 categories is a normal situation, visit this site for example www.priceless-inkjet.com and count categories. All printer's supplier sellers or automotive spare parts should have a rack?
Ps I come from Virtuemart and I've abandonated it for it's poor performances, but with my 15.000 categories it worked slow as Opencart with 400...on the same machine...

however I think is a bug

Are you seeing the CPU spike on your server? or on the PC you are browsing from?

server and pc was the same machine, I've installed also a copy of the site on my online dedicated server and load time was the same: takes 16 seconds to load every page : 14 sec for processing mysql queries and 2 sec for transfer the pages. a similar issue was occurred me with virtuemart's category module, the vm team fixed it.
if you want I can send you the xls sheet with my 400 categories and you can try on your own machine.
another problem is that when you have many categories in the adnmin categories and admin products-insert new product Opencart loads all categories in db in one page, this becomes a big problem when you have many categories, it should truncate the list for example every 100 to have an acceptable load page time

did you optimise all the tables after you imported the data?

also if you could surgest a better way of displaying 15,000 categories?

yes

it should not charge all categories at once, in front-end it should charge only parent categories and when visitor clicks on it, charge only it's childs. in the backoffice's category listing it should truncate the list every 100 categories, and in the produc inserting it should do the same thing of frontend, because it's impossible to show at once 15.000 categories. Virtuemart for example in backend's product managing, to show categories to link to product uses an elegant ajax interface that loads only needed categories selected by a search mask. in this way it can handle billions of categories without performance losing. I think Opencart very good and superior to Virtuemart in it's coding, but ist should copy some trick :-)

mmurph wrote:it should not charge all categories at once, in front-end it should charge only parent categories and when visitor clicks on it, charge only it's childs. in the backoffice's category listing it should truncate the list every 100 categories, and in the produc inserting it should do the same thing of frontend, because it's impossible to show at once 15.000 categories. Virtuemart for example in backend's product managing, to show categories to link to product uses an elegant ajax interface that loads only needed categories selected by a search mask. in this way it can handle billions of categories without performance losing. I think Opencart very good and superior to Virtuemart in it's coding, but ist should copy some trick :-)

well you could write the categories that way, however for most online stores it's not needed. Most people want to be able to have a dynamic menu with all categories in it, then again other than the few types of stores you mentioned hardly any have anywhere near that many categories.
And I dare say even with printers or auto parts there's really no need for that many.

m,y categories are writed that way, parent 1 and 2, then 30 childs for parent1 and 40 for parent 2, then 50-100 childs for eanc parent's child

however I've a programmer working around the front-end issue (that is urgent for me) and I'll post the hack here, so you can evaluate if is the case to apply to the project

I don;t think this is an issue at all.

its a special need just for your type of business. don't be saying opencart has poor performance. 15,000 categories is not a needed requirement for standard shopping cart system. you require a custimised off the self system. you will never find some one selling or offering the type of system you require.

you're in error, your cart needs to be good for both small and large stores to survive in global competition , now is good for small stores, but if it can't handle large databases he never becomes a big cart. However the project is your's and you make what you want.

Daniel wrote:I don;t think this is an issue at all.

you will never find some one selling or offering the type of system you require.

I've just informed you that Virtuemart does it without problems now in standard mode, obviously Virtuemart is globally not good for other reasons and it's team is rewriting it from zero, but actually, in it's "fullbugs" mode does what Opencart can't do: manage billions of categories.

however for my needs I'm hacking Opencart due I think I can made it good for large stores

its nothing to do with small store or not. amazon does not have that many categories, nor does ebay. its a usless feature to support 15,000 categories.

it is not a problem for category quantity, the problem is with organization criteria, don't be offended, I'm tryng to contribute to your project, not asking for free modifications, I'm just offering mine.
I think Opencart is a good project, but it needs some mondification to reach maturity:
1 large categories and product database handling capacity;
2 invoicing system with separate numeration from orders, pdf printing option and csv (or xls) exporting option to integrate in gestional softwares
more control from backoffice to front-end, admin should have capacity to select categories max level showed in the module, select if he wants the add to cart button in product's flypage or in product's list page, search also for categories and not only for products, more control on extra-cart modules, with ability to create one directly from backend, more control on backups: why backup only sql? make a sql and site's backup with an install folder, so in one click admin can change it's server. These are suggestions to make your cart better than now, and also are all works I'm going to make to reach my needs.

Daniel wrote:its nothing to do with small store or not. amazon does not have that many categories, nor does ebay. its a usless feature to support 15,000 categories.

I renmember that the problem actually is not with 15.000 but only with 400....

the problem is with the categories box. What I was saying when I said you can write your categories that way is that you can rewrite the code for the categories box to make it more efficient, but less feature rich. As a choice for the project as a whole I would say don't remove features to satisfy the small percentage that need extreme performance. If someone wants to make a simple one level at a time category list available for those people that's fine, but I don't believe everyone else should suffer for the requirements of the few.

Xsecrets wrote:the problem is with the categories box. What I was saying when I said you can write your categories that way is that you can rewrite the code for the categories box to make it more efficient, but less feature rich. As a choice for the project as a whole I would say don't remove features to satisfy the small percentage that need extreme performance. If someone wants to make a simple one level at a time category list available for those people that's fine, but I don't believe everyone else should suffer for the requirements of the few.

yes, I agree with you, but what I'm tryng to do is to rewrite the category box code in the way you said and leave the original one, so the Opencart has two category boxes, one for big sites and extreme performance, the other for little databases and full category listing, I want to try to place in the admin side the option to choice what kind of listing the shop admin want to show